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The idea of a basic income grantee was around for along time, but previous attempts focused on national institutions to make it become reality. We don't like national institutions.
The invention of bitcoin and several altcoins now make it possible to create a basic income that does not require any third party, it does not need to know who you are, it doesn't even need to know you exist.
You create a network with other people. When mining coins you keep a fraction, the rest will be shared with your fiends. Of the coins they receive they keep a fraction and share the rest with their friends and so on. That's all.
This is just a rough sketch of the idea and what is needed for it to work. No line of code is written yet and there are still many unsolved issues.
It is your turn to follow the path and take the next step.
A basic income grantee is money given
* for every person and the same amount for every person
* enough to survive and participate in life
* unconditional
What we propose does not fit this definition. Therefor we will refer to it simply as income.
friend-to-friend
In DevCoin and Freicoin a part of the reward miners would receive is given to a foundation. Here instead of an institution we form a friend-to-friend network. The Miner keeps a fraction of the reward, the rest is given equally to the befriended nodes. They also keep a fraction of the received reward and forward it to their next nodes. This repeats until there is nothing left to forward or a maximum number of steps is reached. Given a big network with several miners every node will receive several small amounts of coins which together form the income of that node.
http://screenshot.ru/images/2013/08/25/yIr6Nq2.pngOf course everyone can create an unlimited number of nodes and an unlimited number of connections between them, but that is useless until you don't connect to the rest of the network. That's the point in this concept; cheating is tolerated and will form a major part of the network, but it's benefit is limited.
When mining by yourself and forming a network that just consist of your nodes, you would be able to get almost 100% of the revenue. But you wouldn't receive an distributed income either. It is a personal decision if one wants to participate.
proof-of-stack
We can not use proof-of-work like it is done it Bitcoin. Miners would have to invest into hardware and electricity. That would only pay of if keep as much as possible of the reward. Because it is a competitive system miners need to keep the sharing as minimal as possible. With proof-of-stack the way it is used in PPCoin you don't need to invest into additional resources. While in PPCoin you fist need a balance in your wallet to start minting, the income provides everyone a start for minting, you don't need to buy some coins first. This will make the process of generating coins even more distributed.
demurrage
With an income like that you could imagine people just saving everything without actually using the coins. This problem also exists within other currencies, but would turn out even worse here. A demurrage is a build-in mechanism for the coins to decay over time. If you don't want to loose what you have you have to buy something. That will lead to a constant and fast circulation of the currency and lower the incentive to cheat the network.
forwarding
If you want a robust network it should be a scale-free one. To prevent centralization, you need to make it more expensive – in the sense of invested resources and time – to have more connections. We also don't want “dead” nodes to fill the whole network and take all the generated coins with them into nothingness. The solution to this is a small proof-of-work that is needed to receive and forward income. In Bitmessage such a proof-of-work is required to send messages and intended to prevent spam. In this concept it first serves as a test if the node is active and second to equalize the gained income. The proof-of-work should be proportional to the connections a node has. Someone with thousand connected nodes would have to do the POW thousand times for each forward it receives. It would end up doing 1000*1000 times the work a node with only one connection would do.
carbon-14
While Bitcoin tries to imitate Gold, this concept is behaves more like carbon-14. It is present in all living things on earth. While they consume carbon, the isotope decays at the same time, which leads to a constant level of Carbon-14 in the body. In the same way you earn your income, while the coins decays at the same time. Given enough time you will end up with a constant level of coins in your wallet.
conclusion
We started with the goal to create a basic income grantee that is independent from government and financial institutions. Combining several technologies that are already available it now seems less utopic than before. Some of the remaining issues might be complicated, but they will be solved too if people try it.
All that is left to do is work.
We have confidence in your passion.
Nanami Soangso & Paul Reingold
